TOI Social Impact Awards: They script a win-win story with rural women

Corporate Category Srinivasan Services TrustBorn in | 1996 Founder | TVS Motor CMD Venu Srinivasan Pioneering work in | Empowering rural women to become self-reliant Area of work | Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh KEY PROJECTS | Teaching rural women the trade of making furniture out of lantana wood Helping women earn a livelihood making chapattis in community kitchens Involving women in animal rearing, dairy activities, agriculture VELLORE: For years, Poochiamma, a tribal woman from north Tamil Nadu’s Javadi Hills, would spend most of her day looking for work. A daily-wage labourer, her hungry and malnourished children were school dropouts. Many in this remote region shared her plight. Today, thanks to a social outreach programme aimed at financially empowering rural women, she joins a dozen others everyday to gather lantana wood from the nearby forest and turn it into marketable products. Harmful to vegetation but commonly found in the Javadi Hills, lantana can substitute cane in furniture. Women of her hamlet have got training and funds to process the raw material into finished goods. It’s a win-win story. Forest officials allow tribals to cut the wood and save the forest. In turn, they find the means for a livelihood. The project’s driving force is the Srinivasan Services Trust (SST) — a TVS Motor Company and Sundaram-Clayton Limited development initiative — that employs about 150 tribals. The trust prefers to facilitate rather than bankroll the scheme: It helped Poochiamma and others get bank loans and ensures they pay installments on time. Launched in 1996 by TVS Motor chairman and managing director Venu Srinivasan, SST began welfare work building roads and water tanks, renovating schools and organizing health camps around its Hosur factory. Soon it realized that this wasn’t helping generate means for livelihood. “We gave and they took. We realized we couldn’t sustain the programme for long,” SST chairman Ashoke Joshi says. That’s when SST decided to empower women. It started with a chapatti-making initiative near TVS’s Hosur plant. Women in a nearby village earned up to Rs 2,000 a month making chapattis that the factory canteen bought. They worked out of a community hall. Soon, there were more orders and more women joined in. Initially, the village men resisted saying women should not use the community hall as kitchen. But the women refused to give up. They formed self-help groups (SHG), approached the government for land and built four kitchens with a bank loan. “The women strengthened our will,” Joshi, who joined the NGO after retiring from the IAS, says.

SST now has 130 staff and covers about 1,000 villages in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka , Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh. Over 7 lakh people are employed through more than 2,500 SHGs. In TN alone, state estimates say, nearly 2.5 lakh people are covered in Vellore, Hosur and Tirunelveli districts. In most villages, the initiative has resulted in better school enrolment, higher nutrition levels for women and children and a rise in agriculture yields. Padavedu Panchayat in Vellore district , once a poverty-stricken cluster of over 100 villages, is a typical success story . Here, women have joined hands to do what they know best—animal rearing, agriculture and making agarbattis. The trust has helped them get better at their work. For instance, an SHG leader Indirani , who once owned cows that produced milk just enough for her family, now sells milk. Almost every house in the panchayat has cows. Together, they produce over 50,000 litres of milk a day. Vijaya Sekar, Padavedu panchayat president says the next challenge is to create market linkages to empower women to take more risks. “Many women are still shy, averse to risks. We will have to increase their aspiration levels,” she says.